Trade thing 5ish: Progress

I redid the equation I use to decide how many of an item are likely to be sold per day.

The first version was okay for high-volume items, but was bad at identifying items which sell less than one unit per day, which I don't really want to bother with. When I ran the trade finder many of the results were low-volume items that it thought I could trade and make a huge profit on, while actually doing so would have involved days of 0.01ing to sell a single unit.

The second version had the opposite problem -- it successfully ignored low-volume items, but thought it would be a super good idea for me to haul four trillion units of tritanium from jita to amarr.

So I put away the automatic curve fitter and did the variables by hand. Version three successfully ignored low-volume items, and thought jita moved about 15 billion units of tritanium per day. Huzzah.

Version four is version three with a flatter curve to make mid-high-range numbers more accurate. When I ran it for the first time the list of most profitable trades contained largely mid-range production stuff like ice products and PI or reaction materials, so I sighed and went to the game to get real numbers to compare with eve-central values... and it turned out the equations's numbers were correct. So I'm calling it good.

Also, I hadn't included taxes before, which resulted in the "profit" numbers it returned being inaccurate. If you move 4 billion isk worth of stuff for a before-tax profit of 150 million, the tax eats half of it. If you can move 1 billion for a profit of 149 million, that's a much better trade.

I guess this is the point where I do a trial run and see what happens.

Indy contributor: November

Another passive income month, refreshing orders every 90 days so they don't expire.

It looks like goons moved their staging point 1 jump away closer into my teritory (market hub proximity?). I dunno, it looks like there are more active players in the area where I am, including docked and undocked scouts. I'm probably not going to get my profit from these custom offices from PI this month, but it doesn't matter. 10k m^3 of p2 products is the limit of storage on my planets, so I'll first reach this number before I really get into it.

Blueprints haven't changed so far, but I am thinking about moving my off-character on my main account due to the price of PLEX.

Thinking about trade 4: It's happening?

So, I got the trade finder to run. Upon running it with only the first 150-ish items (out of about 3600), and only using amarr and jita as buy/sell systems, and only taking the top 10 results, it produced this:

As a sanity check I went to amarr and jita, found the real prices of the items and the quantities I would really buy, and got this:



As expected the quantities are pretty badly off, but the tool has successfully identified profitable trades and even put them in more or less the correct order. I'm calling this a win.

Thinking about trade 3: In which I build a list of items the easy way

Turns out my shell service wasn't banned from eve-central after all. The issue was a bug which made it look exactly as though it was -- complete with realistic timeouts on connection attempts.

Anyhoo, I'm trying to build a list of item types which are worth trading. My eventual plan, if I can get it to work, is to move items between trade hubs, which is a high-volume, low-margin proposition, so I've decided somewhat arbitrarily that I can ignore any item which Jita moves less than a billion isk worth of per day. We know The Equation can be off by at least a factor of 9, so I'm having it drop items it thinks move less than 100m per day.

Which turns out to be quite a lot of them. My list of items with market groups, minus blueprints, comes out at around 9700 items. Watching the process run, I'm expecting the number it thinks are worth trading to be less than half of that.

Thinking about trade 2: A list of typeIDs which can be found on the market

This is a list of all typeIDs which can be found on the market, taken from the latest static dump. It was very hard to get, so I may as well share.

In other news, I've gotten a free shell service banned from using the eve-central API. Which is exactly why I wasn't using my home IP.

Thinking about trade

I'm very lazy. I would never be able to compare hundreds of item types every day or maintain hundreds of buy and/or sell orders. But there's a lot of money in trade, so I keep thinking about it, trying to find an easy way to do it.

It would be easy to write a program that uses eve-central data to compare item prices in different market hubs. However, if you only look at prices, all the program's top results  would be very expensive items, like capital ships and deadspace modules. Eve-central doesn't track how many units are sold per day, so it's impossible to calculate profit potential.


And then I thought, "or is it"? Eve-central does track how many units of an item are on the market, and I'll bet there's a correlation between how many units are on the market and how many units are sold per day.

Of course, the market being what it is, there will never be a particularly strong correlation -- but it doesn't have to be strong. It just has to tell me that moving a bunch of nocxium at a profit of 10 isk per unit is more profitable than moving a single unit of whatever at a profit of one million per unit.

So I took a sample of item types and blah blah spreadsheets and quadratic regression blah and got this:

The sample size is way too small, but I can always go back and redo the equation with better numbers. The point is that it more or less works and I can tell how many units are being sold to within about an order of magnitude.

Next step? Sorcery.

Added a little something to the spreadsheet

Completely automated. I should have learned to import from eve-central a long time ago.